Tuesday's Class Recap and Reminders for Next Week

 REMEMBER, no reading or work for next week! Instead, we're going to discuss how to read Shakespeare (his language, that is) in Tuesday's class. I'll give you a handout in class which will help you tackle The Comedy of Errors the following week, as well as give you some insight into Shakespeare's unique brand of poetry and syntax. If you want to get a jump on the play, you certainly can, but it's not required. You should think about writing your Paper #1 though! 

Below are some of the highlights of Chapters 3-4 and some of what we did in class:

We watched the scene above from Groundhog Day which was also referenced in Chapter 4 of Bevis' Comedy: A Very Short Introduction.

• Caricature becomes character: when does the joke stop being funny to us—and to her?
• SURPRISE: Page 50...The essence of humor is surprise—how is this scene surprising?
• ROUTINE: Page 49...makes surprise possible; everything is so ordinary, but what makes it extraordinary? Isn’t it normal because WE see it over and over?
• METAPHOR: As Bevis writes, You live and learn and then you die…but what if you don’t? This is certainly true of the movie! So why is it funny to replay the same day over and over and think you're trapped, as we all do? Isn't the joke on us? 
• THE JOKE: Repeating every day is what we ALL do; if we paid more attention, we would also know everyone’s stories (and maybe, our own!)
• Page 60: “Yeah, that about sums it up for me”

 ROMANTIC COMEDY

• Page 52: FALLING IN LOVE: To fall in love is to have lost the plot: even though he knows everything (the plot), he still wants to know her better; he forgets that he’s stuck when he’s around her—she is still unknowable
• WHY ROMANTIC COMEDY IS SUCH A GENRE: LOVE MAKES THE MUNDANE INTERESTING AND THE ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY. IT MAKES US FORGET THE ‘PLOT’—OUR NORMAL LIVES, OUR JOBS, OUR RESPONSIBILITIES.

CHARACTER AND IDENTITY

• The idea of “character”: not something you are, but something you play (38): Your moral character, you’re such a character, etc.
• The disparity between what a person is and what he affects to be (39)
• CARICATURE: Page 40: you can reveal the truth by stretching it! Over the top, hyperbole, caricature, satire
• PEOPLE ARE FICTIONS: we fall into the scripts that other people write for us (45)
• 47: Important point—there’s nobody, it seems, that we resemble less than ourselves, yet we are never more ourselves than when we are reminded of the fact. How does comedy help us appreciate this 'fact'?